


Beginnings Without End

by UmbriFiica



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Abuse, Alien Culture, Ambiguous Age, Child Death, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Emotionally Hurt Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Evil Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Injured Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Legal Shenanigans, Mind Games, Mind Meld, Mistakes, Parent Death, Pre-Split, Shapeshifting, Unhappy Ending, were made
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-15 21:33:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15422031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UmbriFiica/pseuds/UmbriFiica
Summary: Short stories from the Star Trek universe that have been started but may not go anywhere more.





	1. Darkness Falls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You never know what lurks in the depths of someone's mind.

"So, what you're saying, is we're on some sort of intellectual plane? Completely separate from our physical bodies?"

"It is more emotional than intellectual, Captain." Hi'aeka stays close while Jim trails his fingers along the books. "But it is a place of the mind, yes. Anything can be here, if you have the strength to think it."

"Anything?" Jim's eyes glint with mischief and he turns to one of the large gardens that are scattered amongst the books. He stares at it for a moment, his face determined but still smiling. Out of the center of the garden, a statue begins to rise of a sitting figure, eyes closed and one hand outstretched. Hi'aeka doesn't have to look closely to see that it is made of sand. The figure is joined by another and then another until there is a row of cross-legged supplicants sitting on giant orbs. For a moment, the globes flash to glass but as they do, the heads start crumbling and the entire structure collapses into a giant heap of wet sparkling grains. Jim is breathless with laughter and Hi'aeka stares at him with some concern. He briefly waves a hand at her before leaning over and bracing both hands on his knees.

"Wow. That was amazing!" Concentrating on the mess he's made, he wills the sand to turn back to whatever it was before he started building, imagines it becoming a garden and air once more. His grin grows as the plants take shape, the sand melting away as though it had never been there. "A lot more work than I was expecting, but easily the coolest thing I've seen today. Maybe even all month."

"I'm glad our home strikes you as 'cool', Captain." His face turns a little sheepish at her tone and he straightens up while he turns to face her.

"My apologies." She cuts him off before he can continue.

"There is no need to apologize. I brought you here to be impressed. You can hardly help us if you are not willing to overstep on occasion." She starts walking away and Jim follows, jaw dropping as the library behind them melts away. The stone of the courtyard they are now walking through seems to glow from within, dimly lighting the fountains that flow into streams.

"And how do you need our help, exactly?"

"Simply bringing you here has helped invigorate the minds connected to this place, made them stronger, less afraid to explore and create. Every time you make something, it strengthens us."

"You're saying that me making a row of sand Buddhas has done all that." His voice is incredulous.

"What of this courtyard?" She gestures around them. "This is not one of our places, nor of our doing. You brought it here and didn't even know it."

"Huh. That's edging a little away from awesome and into terrifying."

"Jim?" A sleep-hoarse voice breaks into the conversation, and both the captain and the councilor turn in surprise to see the lanky form of Dr. McCoy standing behind them, leaning heavily on one of the newly materialized trees. "What's going on?"

"Bones!" There is a touch of nervousness in Jim's voice that he hopes goes unnoticed - having been witness to McCoy's many rants about telepathy and mind melds, he isn't quite sure how his friend is going to react to being linked with so many people.

"Where are we, Jim?" The low growl tells Jim he wasn't quite as successful as he had hoped.

"Well, we're kind of in our minds?"

"You've got to be kidding me." Running his hands through his hair, he moves toward one of the stone benches in Jim's garden. "Of all the damned, foolish, cockamamie, reckless..."

"Bones, come on!" He follows after his friend. "Your leg's not even hurt in here if you don't want it to be."

"And where is here again, Jim?" he spits, eyes blazing as he rounds on his captain. "Inside my damn mind?!"

"It's not just your mind Bones, it's everyone's. The whole planet connects and shares and creates here. They want us to help spark some new creativity and stuff. I guess they're getting a little stagnant..." He trails off as the blood drains from Leonard's face. The doctor looks horrified.

"You've brought me into a mind link with the whole damn planet?" Voice hoarse with terror, he backs away, glancing around as if to find somewhere to hide. "You know how I feel about these things!" The stones where he steps start to turn black, smoking, inky veins spreading from everywhere he touches, but Jim doesn't notice.

"I didn't bring us here, the To'reshkans did. But since we're here, can't you try and enjoy it?" He reaches his hands out but McCoy slaps them away, dangerously close to hyperventilating.

"Jim, I can't be here right now. It doesn't matter whether I want to or not, I can't." His voice is pleading and he turns to Hi'aeka. "It's too dangerous."

"I'm sorry doctor." Hi'aeka's voice is gentle but colder than Jim would have thought possible. Maybe it wasn't gentle at all, simply quiet. He looks at her to see she's standing even more stiffly than Bones, face tinged purple with...fear? "Without access to your physical body, only the one who brought you into the mindscape can take you back out."

"I don't know where he is," Bones whispers, face ashen. "I stood up and he was gone."

"Bones, it's ok." Jim steps toward him, but he turns and starts limping away, quickly as he can. He actually gets a pretty good head start, Jim staring in confusion, but the captain shakes himself out of it and gives chase. Frustrated that Bones won't even slow down to listen, he decides to use the tools available to him. Concentrating on where Bones is headed, Jim focuses in front of his friend, raising the ground right where his injured leg is about to set down. Bones hits the small hill and jars his leg, crying out in pain and falling towards the ground. Jim leaps forward to catch him, but Leonard's body slows and spins while still in the air, his white scrubs ripping away. When he lands, he is sitting on the ground in a suit that's more fitted than anything Jim has ever seen the irascible doctor in. One arm rests on a drawn up knee while the other covers his face.

"Oh, Jim-boy, you've really done it now." Bones' voice is different, but Jim can't put a finger on how, trying to catalog the changes in his friend's body but unable to really do so without seeing his face.

"I'm sorry if I hurt you Bones, but..."

"Bones? Not quite." Leonard looks up and now it's Jim's turn to take a step back. The man sitting in front of him is still unmistakeably Leonard McCoy, but his face is younger, sharper, and harder than the one Jim is used to. And his eyes...his bright blue eyes rival the color of Jim's own, but they are a shade of cold that Jim wouldn't have thought Bones capable of. There is fury in those eyes, fury and an arrogance that chills Jim to his core. This stranger wearing Bones' face runs his hands over his thighs, gripping hard where Jim knows McCoy took that knife. No reaction.

"Alright, so let's see what we have." It's easier to hear the difference now - where Leonard's Georgian drawl is honeyed and ever-present, his new voice doesn't have even a hint of an accent, words resounding with a tone of cruel amusement instead. "No wound."

He reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out an old-fashioned wallet, the kind that people used to carry identification in before the advent of biometrics. Opening it, Jim can see that it's empty. The man...no, Bones, this is Bones...flips through each pocket and when he sees there is nothing in it, shows his teeth in a feral grin like nothing Jim's ever seen before.

"No self." The words don't register for a moment and by the time they do, Jim can only look on as strange-McCoy (he can't think of him as Bones with those eyes) lifts a hand up and pulls a knife out of thin air. They both watch the knife become a pistol, then a rose, then a scalpel. The items keep changing until it becomes an apple he's holding. He lifts it to his face and runs it across his cheeks and down his nose before inhaling deeply and then licking its shiny red skin. He contemplates it a moment more.

"Just thought," he whispers almost reverently, glancing up at Jim through his eyelashes. The coy look that would usually warm Jim's body sends a chill through him instead. Strange-McCoy smirks when he sees the shiver. Eyes not leaving Jim's, he takes a bite of the apple, then holds it out to the captain. Jim looks down and gives a shout of horror, stumbling backward when he sees that it isn't an apple with a bite out of it. It's a heart.

He looks back to evil-McCoy (not just strange, not any longer) and sees him lick blood off his lips, still leaving plenty to run down his chin. He leans back on his elbows, legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. Smiling that shark's grin again. Jim can see his teeth lengthening into fangs and fingers sharpening into claws. A fog starts to billow from behind him and their eyes meet once more. Evil-McCoy chuckles low and chilling right before he fades from view.

"This is gonna be fun."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think he turns into this massive black dragon, a la Maleficent at the end of Sleeping Beauty. You take it where you want it though.


	2. Couldn't You Hear Me Say (I Love You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's always had trouble saying the words, so he used different ones instead. It's not his fault they can't hear him, but they'll blame him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the legalities don't quite match with real life, but I do not profess to be a lawyer, merely a humble fanfiction writer. This chapter has a lot of ideas behind it, so it will probably be in constant flux as I add the things I want to bring up. In its current version, it is merely a placeholder, a taste of what the final chapter will look like. I'll let you know when it's done for real.

He's just lost his daughter and he's just lost his father, but she's in his face, shrill voice screaming at him, all the words she knows he hates and before his brain can fight through the bourbon, his hands are on her shoulders and he shoves. She hits the table on the way down and then they're both on the floor. She's crying from the pain, blood leaking from a jagged cut where she connected with the sharp corner and he reaches for her only to be shoved back himself. 

"Joce, let me help," he almost shouts, frantic at the sound of her tears and the smell of blood and all the memories that are being dragged up, and the next thing he knows, Clay is in his house holding his wife, and the police are dragging him outside.

"Let me help, please," in a broken voice, so different from his normally rich tones.

"You've helped enough, Doc." The officer's voice is cold and he knows why. There aren't many in this town that will stand for a man who hits a woman and those who will aren't the sort of people anyone wants to be around. And now he's one of them. He doesn't put up a fuss when the officer shoves him in the back of the police hover, simply stares blankly at the ground.

***

It's called entrapment, and it's the only reason he gets to keep his license. By some miracle, he had ended up with a decent lawyer, one who was smart enough to find proof that his wife was having an affair and spun words well enough to make it plain that she had provoked Leonard that night. The jury concedes that he had only been trying to defend himself and, drunk as he had been, if he had meant to hurt her, he would have been able to do much more damage than a small cut on her shoulder blade. Although the bruise had been, frankly, spectacular. The quick appearance of the lover as well did not do any favors for the prosecution. He gets off with a verdict of "Not Guilty," much good that it will do him here. Jocelyn and Clay have spread their poison through the town and any sympathy they might have had for his father and daughter's passing is gone, given to his wife...ex-wife and mother instead. They think he's a wife-beater now, even the people who have known him since he was a child. There's another whisper going around too, one that has made it easier for people to turn on him.

 _Murderer_.

His patients stop coming and the nurses that don't quit treat him with a special kind of hostility, the kind that makes existence itself a chore. So he closes his practice and starts making the commute to Atlanta General again. The big city doesn't usually care what goes on in the backwoods, and the hospital administration has been begging him to come back, but there is enough scandal floating around him that no one troubles themselves with getting close to him. Nurses and doctors alike are polite but distant with him and his drinking only gets worse.

The last straw breaks when his mother starts packing his father's things but won't let him in the house.

"Please, mama, let me help." She doesn't hear him any more than Jocelyn had though, and in her own grief, she turns him away.

He leaves town the next day.


End file.
